A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  The second cellar felt less earthy. There was very faintly in the air a warm smell which made them think of Christmas. Simon held up the candle in its tin holder and looked around.

  ‘I know what it is,’ he said. ‘This is the wine cellar.’

  In amazement they looked around. On principle neither Tobias nor Nathan believed in taking strong drink, and the women in their family would have been appalled at the suggestion that any should pass their own lips except for an occasional sip of communion wine. At Christmas, however, both Abigail and Harriet unbent so far as to lace their festive cakes and puddings with alcohol, and one small bottle of ruby wine was purchased from Flett’s for each of the households. Now here in front of their astonished eyes Tirza and Simon saw rows of bottles lying on their sides on racks stretching away into the dimness beyond the circle of candlelight. Simon carried the candle closer and examined the bottles first on one side of the cellar and then on the other.

  ‘It looks like white wine on the left and red wine on the right,’ he announced in awe-struck tones. There was something else in his voice too. A kind of longing. Tirza felt sick. Abigail had lectured her on the dangers of drink. There was a certain small tavern, the Schooner Bar, on the other side of Flamboro harbour from their house, that she was warned never to approach. When the fishing boats came in, a few of what Abigail called ‘the undesirables’ were known to consort there and take strong drink, which made them dangerous to decent folk, and was rotting away their brains and livers so that any day now they would drop down dead in the street. Tirza had no reason to doubt the truth of this, though she sometimes chafed at Abigail’s other strictures. She tugged at Simon’s coat sleeve.

  ‘Come out of there. It’s horrible.’

  She led the way into the next cellar. Simon followed her, muttering, ‘They must be worth hundreds of dollars. Hundreds.’

  The third cellar proved to contain nothing more interesting than bunkers of coal, logs and kindling. As their candle lit up the room there was a brief frantic scuffling from the kindling bunker.

  ‘Rats,’ said Tirza with distaste. She was not exactly afraid of rats, not on the farm where they sometimes rustled amongst the hay and were hunted down by the wild barn cats. And in fact she had a certain fondness for field mice. But she didn’t want to meet rats here in this confined space with its unpleasant, graveyard smells.

  They retreated to the cellar stairs and Simon pointed out that the door up into the kitchens had no lock on it. From there they were free to wander at will all over the house. The downstairs rooms were as he had described them to Tirza. The furniture was all covered with yellowing dust-sheets. Lifting them up they could see uncomfortable-looking couches and chairs with gilded wood and silky damask upholstery, fragile and splitting with age. They recognised a harp in one corner under its cover, much larger than the Irish harp in the Penhaligons’ drawing room. They climbed on top of the dining-room table to inspect one of the peculiar bags hanging from the ceiling and found that it enclosed a fancy chandelier – looped strings of faceted glass like diamond necklaces for a giantess. Touched, the chandelier tinkled with a cold sweet sound.

  Generations of disapproving Tremaynes stared down at them from the walls as they poked and pried. They were a handsome lot, but arrogant looking with their high noses and magnificent old-fashioned clothes. Near the top of the row hanging on the wall up the side of the stairs there was one face which seemed much more friendly. It was a young man with a pair of gun dogs at his heels and a hat perched at a cocky angle on his curly hair. Tirza took the candle from Simon and peered at the brass plate fixed to the bottom of the frame.

  ‘Everard Tremayne 1890,’ she read. ‘Say, Simon, that must be Miss Susanna’s young man, the one who was sweet on her when they went on the skating party.’

  They looked at the painting with respect. It was history, that painting, thought Tirza. The past. But Miss Susanna had known him. And he looked like somebody you could know even now, despite his old-fashioned clothes.

  Simon had not come upstairs when he had found his way into the house before, so they were exploring new territory now. The bedrooms were in some ways more intriguing than the downstairs rooms, because things had been left lying about. In the main bedroom that faced towards the ocean they found a book on the night-stand beside the bed, a pair of yellowed lace gloves and some tarnished silver-backed brushes on a dressing table inside one of the windows. There were folding wooden shutters as well as sunshades blocking the windows. Both of them pulling together, they managed to fold the shutters back, ripping apart the sticky cobwebs which were netted across the cracks. The hinges squealed, startling them for a moment, but there was no one to hear. The shade fell inwards away from the window glass with a sigh. The shades were designed to be used in summer, pulled down to keep the rooms cool and protect the furniture from the sun. The shutters were for winter warmth. For some reason the Tremaynes’ manager had pulled down the shades and then closed the shutters, trapping the shades behind them.

  It was then that Tirza, pulling the shade to one side, saw her aunt walking home along the coast path with her chip basket over her arm. Inside this abandoned house she felt like the ghost of one of the ancient Tremaynes looking out on the sunshine of a winter’s day of some other century. The sounds of Simon moving about the room faded, but the sight of the snowy terraces cascading down from the house to the cliff-edged lawn brightened sharply. She sensed, but did not see, other people moving about that winter garden, caught an echo of laughter from the direction of the stables. The image of the house and its interlocked life of family and servants burned for a moment on her inner eye as fierce and cold as the air over the ice on Gooseneck Lake. The sensation of herself as a someone else gripped her, then spun away, leaving her dizzy. She turned from the window to see that Simon was pulling out drawers and opening cupboards.

  ‘Do you think we ought to do that?’ she asked doubtfully. Somehow their presence seemed more of an intrusion up here in this bedroom than it had in the cellars or the downstairs rooms.

  Simon looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Why not? They’ve been gone for years – soon after we were born. If they wanted any of this stuff they’d have come back for it, wouldn’t they? Or sent for it?’

  He sounded reasonable, but Tirza felt a ripple of discomfort as he took a pearl-handled pocket knife out of a desk drawer and carried it over to the window to examine. She turned to look at the bed. It was an old four-poster, carved and ornamented, with brittle curtains looped back and tied with heavy cords to the posts at the head. There was a frilled canopy above, from which a length of braid dangled down, swaying slightly in a current of air. She realised with a shock that they must be creating the movement in the air themselves, and before they had intruded the air in the room had been quite still for years, since she was a small child. She touched the elegant frilled bedcover cautiously with a single fingertip, as though it might fall apart. It reminded her of Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations, which she and Christina had read together the previous fall. Except that this room seemed prettier, less depressing than she had imagined Miss Havisham’s house. And since they had opened the shutters the room was filled with a diffused sunlight, bright from the reflections off the snow.

  Tirza picked up the book from the night-stand. The Poems of Robert Frost. A faded green ribbon was marking a place, and she let the book fall open at the page. ‘The Road Not Taken’. She read the poem, standing there in the elegant empty room, and wondered who had left the marker but never come back for the book.

  ‘Will you please stay back after class, Tirza Libby,’ said Miss Bennett. It was an order, not a request. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  Wilma Potts rolled her eyes at Tirza. She spent most of her time in school either crouched over their shared desk half asleep or balking at supposed threats from every corner. She drew away from Tirza now as though she were contagious, taking her sour unwashed smell with her. Tirza did not like Wilma, but
she felt sorry for her. When they changed into their heavy cotton slips for gymnastics, she had seen the red weals across Wilma’s back, the marks of far harsher beatings than she ever received herself.

  Her own minor misdemeanours were punished by Abigail, who wielded a thin whippy switch, cutting a few swift stripes across the back of Tirza’s bare legs. Occasionally, if she was really angry, she insisted that Nathan give Tirza the belt – something he would rarely do on his own account. Humiliated and furious after a belting, Tirza would seek consolation by sailing Stormy Petrel far out to sea, until Flamboro diminished to a blur on the shoreline. In winter, when flight over the waves was impossible, she usually escaped to Christina’s cabin.

  In the lower grades, she had barely had occasion to speak to Wilma. She hadn’t given much thought to that heavily marked back. But now that they shared a desk she was more aware of it, especially on Mondays when Wilma was particularly apt to wince if Tirza bumped against her accidentally.

  She grinned at Wilma reassuringly now.

  ‘Can’t be anything too bad. Maybe she wants me to be ink monitor next week.’

  Wilma gave her a feeble smile. Tirza was never ink monitor. She was too impatient. Instead of filling the china ink-wells in each desk neatly from the long-spouted ink can, she would pour too fast, splashing the ink about and overfilling the wells so that ink seeped through the well holes, trickling down and ruining the papers and books stored inside.

  As the rest of the class gathered their belongings and filed out to the corridor to put on their outdoor clothes, Tirza reviewed her conduct over the last week. She could think of nothing meriting punishment. She’d even been given an A minus for her theme on the subject of ‘Liberty’. She had quite enjoyed writing it. As the work on Stormy Petrel was finished and all Nathan’s gear was mended and refurbished, she had not been pining to get her homework over with as soon as possible each evening. She hoped Miss Bennett would be quick, because she had promised to visit Christina. The snow was beginning to soften, and she would have to wade through it in boots, which dragged out the time of the walk.

  Miss Bennett closed the door and came back to her desk. She looked strained about the eyes, although she smiled at Tirza. Her fiancé Pete Flett had been at sea for a month now, and was believed to be on convoy duty in the North Atlantic, though no one knew for sure.

  ‘Now, Tirza,’ said Miss Bennett, beckoning to her, ‘I won’t keep you long. I was very pleased with the theme you wrote this week.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to speak to you for some while, but it was your theme that made me sure it was time.’

  Tirza waited, with a politely enquiring look on her face.

  Miss Bennett twisted a pencil between her fingers, and did not seem to know how to go on.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’ said Tirza encouragingly.

  ‘You see, you have a very good mind, Tirza. But most of the time you don’t use it. You and I both know that. You do just enough to get by, and not a jot or tittle more. I watch you in class. You whip through your math in no time, then you just sit daydreaming. You’ve read more books than anyone else in class, I know that from some of the answers you come out with.’

  ‘My grandmother and I read things together,’ said Tirza gruffly, not sure where all this was leading.

  ‘Mrs Libby?’ said Miss Bennett in surprise.

  ‘No, my other grandmother. Mrs O’Neill.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miss Bennett looked even more surprised. ‘The – er – lady who lives in a cabin in the forest?’

  ‘She graduated from Vassar summa cum laude,’ said Tirza coldly.

  ‘Really? I’d no idea. Ah, perhaps that accounts for it.’

  Miss Bennett tapped her teeth with her pencil.

  ‘You see, Tirza, I think you could be a really good scholar. Perhaps you could go to college like your grandmother, and become a lawyer, or a doctor. Do something fine with your life. I think you have it in you. But not if you go on wasting your time, not making any effort with your studies. What do you say?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tirza mumbled. ‘I don’t understand what you are asking.’

  ‘You’ll be going to high school in Portland next fall. You have a few more months before the end of this school year. I want you to try really hard, to work at your studies, so you’ll be put into one of the top classes when you go there, one that will prepare you for college boards in four years’ time. Will you do that? Will you do that for me?’

  Tirza shuffled her feet uncomfortably.

  ‘I’ll try, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Miss Bennett looked relieved to have finished her speech. ‘Off you go then.’

  Outside Tirza sprang up the hill towards the path through the forest as fast as the soggy snow would let her. Study harder? Go to college? She laughed out loud. Not likely. She had better things to do with her time.

  Winter was slackening its grip on the land. Snow began to slide off roofs in the warmth of midday, but at night the frost bit as hard as ever. The slipping, slithering snow – caught distorted on houses and barns, on fish sheds and fir branches – froze overnight into grotesque shapes. Tobias and Sam finished cutting the foot-square blocks from the ice-pond. Tirza stood on the ice pushing the blocks along the channel of clear water with a pole, while Tobias and Simon hoisted them on to the ice sled. The plough-horse Lady towed the sled, without anyone to lead her, down to the ice-house, a half-subterranean structure under a dark corner of the woods which never caught the sun, even in midsummer. There Sam tipped the blocks off the sled and stacked them up, piling sawdust around them for insulation. The others joined him there when each load had been shifted and they worked together, packing everything tightly till no corner of ice showed. It was serious work. Well insulated, the ice would keep until the cold winds began again in fall. Poorly cobbled together, the store of ice would turn into slush and sink away during the heat of July and August, just when it was needed to keep the ice-boxes cold for meat and fish. Even more urgently, it was needed to cool down the milk cans after milking. Tobias felt about his supply of ice for the summer just as Harriet felt about the stores of bottled and canned food she laid by for winter. When the work was finished and the ice-house filled, he sighed in satisfaction.

  ‘That’s a good job done, then. This will be one summer we won’t run short.’

  He shook his head with an exasperated laugh.

  ‘You two won’t remember, but when Martha was ten we had a real scorcher of a summer. Martha started inviting all her friends over. We didn’t guess what they were up to, though I kept finding the ice-house door open at the end of the long summer afternoons, when I came to load the pickup. Blamed old Sam for it, didn’t I?’

  ‘Ayuh.’ Sam snorted. ‘I knew I ain’t done it, but I guessed who had. Hung around behind that clump of trees one day, and kept my eyes peeled.’

  ‘It was Martha?’ Tirza asked hopefully.

  ‘Ayuh. Showed her pals inside with almighty airs and graces. Let them take bits of ice to suck and put on their heads to keep cool in the heat. Charged them a nickel a time.’

  Tobias grunted. ‘Lost a lot of the ice with the door being left open. There was barely enough to see August out, and none at all for September, which was near as hot that year.’

  ‘So that’s why you’ve always said you’ll tan my backside if I go in the ice-house,’ said Simon.

  ‘Wasn’t ever going to run that risk again,’ said Tobias.

  Two weeks after the last of the ice had been cut and the ice-house finally filled, Dancer’s foal was born, in the middle of a night loud with sleet-laden gales.

  It was a long and difficult birth, and Simon stayed up all night with his father and Sam in the horse barn, helping as much as he could. Harriet spent the time carrying out rags and buckets of hot water from the kitchen, and making them sandwiches and coffee. They struggled with the labouring mare, her eyes staring till the whites showed. Simon’s nostrils were filled
with the bitter smell of man sweat and the sweet smell of horse sweat, and the sweeter, sticky smell of blood. At last the foal, a colt, lay motionless on the straw, its coat wet and streaked with blood. It looked dead.

  It wasn’t the first time Simon had helped with a birth. But that night every detail seemed to burn into his mind. He felt the mare’s pain and fear, and his shirt stuck to his skin with sweat. The loose box throbbed with some feeling which was new to him. A revulsion against farming, against the passion and the suffering and the ruthlessness of it all rose up in his throat, choking him. He wanted to escape, out into the clean night air, away from the tentacles of the farm which bound him like chains. But instead he knelt by Dancer’s head, caressing her gently behind the ears, while she drew long shuddering breaths. Her legs were trembling, and convulsive ripples ran over the skin of her side like water in a lake under a strong breeze. Lady, whose foal was due in another couple of weeks, leaned her head over the partition between the stalls and whickered anxiously.

  Feeling the coarse hair of Dancer’s mane soaked with sweat under his hand, Simon began to rub her neck dry with a handful of straw while Tobias and Sam worked on the foal with an old rough towel. Usually Tobias whistled tunelessly between his teeth when he had just delivered a foal or a calf, but he was silent now, and Simon feared for the colt.